I haven’t eaten a healthy thing in four days now. I am going to have to go on a vegetable IV drip if this keeps up. Since Erik started on his Christmas Baking Frenzy, we have switched our four food groups to sugar, flour, butter and chocolate. So much deadly deliciousness in such a small package.

It is hard to say how this came about. Perhaps Erik was feeling lonely. This has been our first Christmas without family since 2010, and only our second ever as a foursome. Perhaps he just missed his mother’s Christmas baking, which is understandable, as the woman is a champion. But, whatever the reason, Erik got in a baking mood.

Just in case it has somehow escaped your attention, Erik only has two modes: full out, or full stop.* And, like his mother, he mentally takes the number of people he is ostensibly cooking for and multiplies it by ten.

I found Erik at the computer, merrily typing away.
“I thought you were going to bake cookies,” I said.
“I am.”
I looked over his shoulder. “That’s Excel.”
“Well, I have to make a shopping list, don’t I?”
“One point two kilos of butter? A kilo and a half of sugar?” I shook my head. “I have the basics here, you know. Can’t you just make some cookies from what we have?”
“You don’t have everything I need,” said Erik. “Not the specialty ingredients. This way we can plan to have these items in stock every December. You know, if you’d just let me set up a Kanban system for you…”
But I had already fled to safety. I know better than to stick around when the Kanban talk flares up.

My arteries are clogging up just looking at this list.

So we shopped, and Erik dragged home powdered sugar and lemon zest and magic dust and whatever else he needed. Then he plunked himself in the kitchen and set to work.

And he mixed and he rolled and no one got to eat lunch, because how do you get in the kitchen to make a sandwich when there are bowls of dough and cooling cakes covering every surface? The girls and their friends got into the act, too.

And when there were done, they had produced dozens of excellently tasty German holiday treats.

Day one tally
2 trays Mürbchen
2 trays Vanillekipferl
1 stollen

As we happily ate our way though the treats, I noticed Erik watching. He muttered comments to himself about what types of cookies were being eaten, which items had baked through properly and which needed a little less heat.

And then, this morning, he started unpacking the ingredients again.

“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Making cookies.”
I clutched at the knot of butter and sugar converting itself into adipose tissue in my stomach. “What? More? You can’t be serious.”
“I haven’t even made the shortbread yet! Your grandmother’s shortbread.” Erik looked at the girls then gave me a significant look, as though he were ashamed of my cruel plan to deprive our children of my grandmother’s famous cookies.
I threw my hands in the air. “Do what you like.”

But did he bake just two dozen shortbread cookies like a non-crazy human being would have? He did not.

Day 2 tally
2 trays Vanillekipferl
3 trays shortbread

And they were delicious. Of course they were delicious. But I’m about to have an infarct over here. The kids need to eat something – anything – else. But Dad’s cookies taste so good, nobody wants anything else. I count myself lucky to get a bit of bread and jam into everyone once a day.

But, surely, now that the holiday is behind us, the baking is, too. We can stop here:

Erik whistled as he finished up the baking dishes.
“Thanks for all of the baking, sweetheart,” I said. “It was really good.”
“No problem. Sorry I didn’t get done today.”
I narrowed my eyes as I looked around the clean kitchen. “What do you mean?”
He shrugged. “We have to go out, so I stopped early. I’m going to make another stollen tomorrow.”

Comments

So fantastic. I’d like to get Jamie on the cookie-baking train! The stollen looks really good (we have a fourth ‘child’ from Germany, our exchange student from 2004-5, and this was what I *had* to learn to make for Christmas)- as do all of the cookies, actually! Totally identify with the spreadsheet preparation. Ha! I wish you were down the dock from me. And then, there’s this part of me that wants to wear a bikini again too. ;-)

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Amy Schaefer

Once upon a time there was a woman named Amy Schaefer who had never been to sea. One day her clever husband Erik appealed to her sense of adventure, and before she knew it they had moved aboard Papillon with their two young girls. Since then the Schaefers have sailed far and wide aboard their 57-foot yawl, collecting friends and breaking many boat parts along the way. When she isn't busy keeping small fingers out of the winches or teaching third grade math, Amy writes for SAIL and maintains a blog called Sailing Papillon about her family's adventures.